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child is ‘ready.’ You’re likely to hear echoes of both American and English educational ideas in the ways Australian teachers talk about their work. These admirable intentions unfortunately take no account of the realities of classroom teaching, the most inescapable of which is the ratio of teachers to students in the aver- age classroom. Teachers work hard to indi- vidualise their instruction and to tone down their shows of authority, and compromise when they must – which is often – by asking students to work in groups, often selected on the basis of group members having simi- lar levels of achievement in the relevant cur- riculum area. There’s some fascinating international research that explores the consequences for teaching of the ideals espoused by American and English, and by extension Australian, teachers. Called the Five Nations Study, the research compares observations of day-to- day events in US and English classrooms with classrooms in India, Russia and France, countries that have quite different educational philosophies and the latter two of which, incidentally, have students that routinely score better than many of their English-speaking peers on international tests of achievement. In Russia, education is profoundly shaped by the ideas of Lev Vygotsky. Any- one who has trained in English-speaking countries will probably have heard of Vygotsky and his theories about the link between language and thought. The way his ideas are presented, however, frequently water down the most important elements. Students usually come away with the notion that talk in classrooms is good, but mostly for social reasons, that is, because children gain some social benefits from being able to chat. Vygotsky’s ideas have much more profound consequences for education, however. For Vygotsky and his followers, lan- guage is the means by which the cogni- tive tools of one’s culture are internalised and become one’s own mental toolkit. To achieve this, children need sustained and properly structured dialogue with a more knowledgeable other, be that teacher, par- ent or peer. For this reason, the new – for the English-speaking world – ideas about teaching that are causing a great deal of interest in Britain are called ‘dialogic teaching.’ Investigation of classroom talk in the countries that made up the Five Nations Study reveal that students in Russian and French classrooms regularly have the oppor- tunity to participate in and witness dialogues of the sort that encourage the development of competence in academic knowledge. These dialogues also profoundly affect children’s verbal communication, giving them access to the technical languages of the disciplines, and assisting them to learn to clearly express their ideas and thinking in ways accessible to others. Note that I said participate in and wit- ness dialogues: research has also shown that watching a dialogic exchange between another student and a teacher leads to power ful learning, even at the university student level. This has been labelled vicari- ous learning: the student doesn’t always have to speak to learn, ‘merely’ to listen. The leader of the Five Nations research team, Robin Alexander, proposes that professional development 29